Peter Fagan was a miracle I was not prepared for. On a hot summer night, midway through my lecture tour across the Midwest, the warm scent of corn, pond water, and dirt filled the tent where a crowd of farmers waited for Annie to lead me up the steps and call out the story of my life. As I stood at the base of the three wooden steps leading to the stage, I gripped the stair railing — its cool metal vibrated with the shuffle, then stomp, of heavy boots, an angry tint to the air. The crowd had been waiting for a half hour. "I can't do it," Annie spelled into my palm. "I just can't." A cough rattled her chest, and she doubled over beside me. At last, Annie rallied. On the rickety stage, she cut short her introduction of me. Her hand shook in mine as she called out to the crowd, "I bring you Helen Keller, the miracle."

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Annie and I sat onstage, despondent over the crowd's unfriendly response to that night's lecture, when Peter slid into the billowing, creaking tent. In the night his scent came easily to me: typewriter ink, cigarette smoke, and the strange muskrat smell I always associated with men. A family member back East found Peter to be my private secretary until Annie got better. Annie spelled the telegram into my palm: "Work experience: laid-off Boston Herald reporter. Special qualifications: Long on time, short on cash. Wants the job." He'd even learned finger-spelling.

I held the edge of my chair and felt his footsteps as he swung closer. "Is he handsome?" I asked Annie, nervously smoothing my hair.

"All I can say is, thank God you're blind," she spelled. We both laughed.

"Is he that bad?" I spelled back into her hand — familiar as my own. I cocked my head. Peter felt closer. Annie said, shifting in her chair, "He's looking left, now right." Annie went on, her fingers flying in my palm: "His shirt is unbuttoned. And he's got that shifty look of a person ready to flee."

"Flee?" I leaned closer to Annie.

"His family fled Ireland," Annie went on. "The famine. He's a Socialist now," she told me. "Another supporter of lost causes — like you."

We both laughed again, but I felt a slight mocking in her palm. "Do I look all right?" Always I've liked men better than women; even at age 7 I'd ask Annie to make me pretty. Now, dress tugged down, I sat up straighter.

"He doesn't see you," she rapped. "But he is looking. He's turning this way. Dark hair, he's shaking his jacket off his shoulders, and oh, brown eyes." Relief washed through me as Peter rounded the table. Through the soles of my shoes I felt the sssaah, sssaah of his boots until he swung up to the table and grasped my hand.

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"Miss Kel-ler, a pleasure to see you." I touched his throat and felt a twinge, very slight, that moved to the center of my heart. His voice, rough as twine, thrummed through my fingertips. I felt incapable of taking my hand away. With my ring finger on his larynx and my forefinger on the stubble of his cheek, I felt his parted lips with my thumb. Annie always told me, "For God's sake, Helen, when you're touching a man's face, move fast: Read his words, then drop your hand. People gawk enough without seeing you lingering over some man's drawl."

But Peter drew me in.

"The pleasure is mine," I spelled into his rough palm.

"The famous Helen Keller," he repeated. "I've been following the press on you: a sold-out lecture tour across Canada, and now this tour — two lectures a day, 25 cities, three different states. All in the service of raising money for the blind. Am I right?" That night, under the hot dome of the tent on Wisconsin's lakeshore, I grasped Peter's hand in mine and felt the delicacy of his fingers.

He didn't know the whole story — how could he know that my father had stopped paying Annie's salary when I was 10 years old, and that since my graduation from Radcliffe College, Annie and I had done our show in too many cities to count to pay the bills? We had to keep ourselves afloat.

"I'm so glad," I blurted out, "that you're here to help us."

He just threw his head back and laughed, his vibrating throat a lush drink of creamy milk. "Yes, I'm engaged in the important mission of taking over for Miss Sullivan and getting you two safely home," he said. And I believed him.

Peter turned to Annie. "I'll take her to dinner if you'd like." As always when I was with two people, I held Annie's hand with my left hand and listened as she spelled. At the same time I held my other hand to Peter's lips and lip-read his response. His mouth moved quickly, excitedly, under my fingers; Annie's spelling — usually up to 80 words per minute poured into my palm — was weary.

Peter looped his arm through mine and led me. Just as we stood at the tent's edge, the cool night air hit me: It was filled with the vibrations of the dinner bell — pulsing and fading on Lake Bally's shores. "Are you hungry?" he asked.

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"Starving," I said right back.

The bell stopped tolling, leaving a fist of empty air — and I can tell you now what I did not know then: That bell was just like Peter. Booming with joy. But soon empty. Gone. I held his hand more fiercely in mine.

The metal tablesbehind the hotel were stacked high with food. Immediately "seeing" them in my mind's eye, I had picked up chicken, beets, grilled corn from heaping platters. Peter, his dark hair curling down his neck, eagerly took his place beside me when I touched him in the heat of the night — he was a slender, regal animal. "I'll feed you," he laughed.

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"I'm blind and deaf," I spelled back. "Not dumb. Do you think I can't feed myself?" I knew I wasn't the woman he expected — and I liked it. Chicken in hand, I offered Peter a taste, and he opened his mouth to bite.

"Stop." Annie caught up with us after going backstage to get our paycheck from the tour manager. She put her hand on my arm. Peter lowered his chicken leg to the plate. "Before you eat, you work," she said to Peter, all the while rapidly spelling her words into my palm. "First, you translate the daily newspapers, then the correspondence. Got it? You translate everything — and I mean everything — into Helen's hand. You can start with all this mail."

"You're her link to the world," Annie said. He reluctantly slid the newspaper open and turned to his job as secretary. I felt lit and burning as a fuse.

Peter rearranged his tie, his mouth moving fast under my listening fingers when he read of the Red Sox in the lead for the pennant — maybe they'd finally win the World Series, the bums! Then, suddenly, he flipped to the world news:

SPECIAL TO THEBOSTON GLOBE BY NOAH SANDER, SOMME, FRANCE, JULY 5, 1916 — Yesterday, 57,000 British soldiers were killed in one day at the Battle of the Somme. Tens of thousands were wounded. The battle rages on.

"What a stupid war!" I burst out. Peter's fingernails pressed into my palm as he read, more furious, then softer in sorrow.

Weekly my desk was piled high with desperate letters from German, French, and English soldiers blinded in battle, letters pleading for help. "President Wilson," I said, "is as blind as I am. Fifty-seven thousand soldiers killed in one day in France? For what?"

Peter was surprised by my comment. "Why, Miss Keller," he spelled, "you're calling the President blind?"

"Why not?" I shot back. "He promised peace, but now there's talk that he'll raise the U.S. military from 100,000 to 800,000 in the next year. Is he blind to the consequences of that?"

"I'm a radical, too, but he is the President."

"And I'm Helen Keller. I've met with every sitting President since Grover Cleveland," I spelled back.

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"I know, I know. You were the darling of kings and queens by the time you were 10. Your Radcliffe graduation was front-page news in 1904...."

"You..."

"I'm not a crack reporter for nothing. I've done my research."

We sat together, the mailbag giving off its musty canvas scent. I didn't want to tell Peter there was one thing that was very limited in my life: men.

I felt him reach into the mailbag and pull out a letter. It came from Cologne, Germany. He tapped the contents into my hand:

Miss Keller,

My brother John, he quit the typewriter factory at sixteen to fight in the war. Sent straight to the trenches and into the French line of fire. But Miss Keller, he didn't die.

Only woke up in a hospital blind.

Help him.

Sincerely, Hannah Beutler

I edged closer to Peter as he read. I felt my long nights of blindness invade the life of this boy, this soldier, and I burst out impulsively that Germans loved my autobiography. What if I gave the profits of the German edition to soldiers blinded in the war?

Peter dropped the letter, leaned forward, and put two fingers on my cheek. "If you do, you'll be marked," he said. "I told you, Socialists are being arrested left and right for protesting the war."

"I'm doing it. And when you next come back," I said, "mark the rest of me." I took out a Braille pen from my bag sitting on the chair beside me and scrambled through it to find a piece of notepaper to write my letter right away.

"What are you doing?" Peter asked. "It's too dark to write."

Then I felt his hand pause, until I laughed. "Watch me," I said.

While I pressed the pen to mark the page, Annie walked up to the table and leaned in, tracing her hand over the Braille letters to my publisher. At the same time, I felt Peter's approval of me grow like grass. I knew then that I would cling to him. I was not foolish — I was terrified that Annie would sicken and die, that I would be sent home to live with my mother in the cold, dark cell of Alabama, no longer independent.

The truth is, I was never unknown, but often lonely.

I am yours, I wanted to say as Peter traced his thumb in my palm. My two-dimensional world ballooned out: rounder it felt, smoother, larger. I breathed in fully for the first time.

"Helen, don't be foolish," Annie spelled to me when we reached the hotel's front porch after dinner. "If you give money to Germans — even blind ones — the press will have a field day. Then who will come to our talks? We barely have enough to make it back to Massachusetts," she said, her hand heavy in mine.

"You're tired," I answered, my fingers erratic in her palm. "Are you all right?"

"Don't change the subject."

She sped me across the lobby, all the while talking. I felt the whoosh of air as she pushed open the door to her room.

"Stay here."

She went to the small desk sitting by the far window, came back, and said, "I'll show you how crazy your idea is."

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She had scooped up a loose sheaf of papers and now handed them to me.

"Helen, listen." She read quickly. The top letter said, "American Investment Warning: Stocks at a Loss, Balance Zero." Then she said, "If people stay away from our talks and our stocks keep falling...." She paused. "We won't be able to keep our house more than another few months."

Now that our tour was a failure because I kept talking against the war, we needed our investment returns; without them we couldn't pay the maintenance that August, or for the rest of the fall. But as I sat in the chair next to Annie's bed, I knew the truth was that she was dependent on me for a living, and all the money we made from lecturing went to protect her and pay for my secretaries — all the people we required to keep me looking "normal" in other people's eyes.

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"Don't worry, I'll fix it," I said.

"Face facts, Helen. I have this damned cough day and night. You may have the strength to cross the country still, six months of the year. But Helen, I just don't."

From the open window came a breeze so cold it tightened my chest, but I kept Annie's hand in my own. We had tried making money by lecturing, but by age 50, Annie was worn out.

This cough seemed a good reason for her to do what she had always fought so hard against. To lie down.

And if she wanted to escape, it would be my duty to provide for the one person who had given up her life so I could have my own.

Then just as the bedsprings shuddered and Annie's heavy body leaned into the bed, she said the magic words: "Helen, we've got to have Peter full-time as your secretary when we get back home. I just can't do it anymore. I'm going to make some arrangements. He needs to live nearby."

I'd never felt so alive — or so afraid.

"Are you sure?" I asked, my hands searching for her mouth. I didn't want to mistake her answer.

"What choice do we have? Stuck in this town with another talk to give tomorrow, and no way to get home if I'm this sick. Perfect he isn't, not even close." Annie's fingers rapped my palm. "But he's all we've got."

She tried to lie against her pillows in bed, but her cough forced her up. Then she got her breath and went on. "We used to talk about your 'miracle': how you came to read, write, go to Radcliffe. Succeed. That's what audiences want to hear. Helen" — she shook my arm — "come out of the clouds. Tomorrow, no talk about war. And drop that letter to the Germans in the trash. Do you hear me?"

"Do I hear you?" I almost started a joke, but then remembered that Peter might laugh, but not Annie, not now. "Trust me." I lied so easily.

I took her hand and squeezed it good night. When I felt my way to the door, then down the hall, the pine paneling rough under my hands, it was all I could do to stand at the bottom of the stairwell and then go on to my room beside Annie's instead of climbing those stairs to Peter.

As morning's sunlight fell on my arms, I pitched into an uneasy sleep. I dreamed that Annie was perched high above Niagara Falls as I pushed her straight to the waters below. When I woke up, that image hovered at the dark edge of my memory. I couldn't wait to see Peter.

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I felt my way to my closet and picked a fresh dress from the first hanger, then crossed to my door. In my own house I had memorized everything — tables, chairs, rooms — and walked quite fast. But in new places I was lost. In my well of dark, I climbed one stair, two, until my foot reached a pocket of air. I was at the top of the stairs. I worked my way and stopped, nervously, note in hand, outside the fourth door.

Two quick raps woke Peter. He opened the door and led me to the settee by his windows. "Come on. Spill the beans. What is it?" he said, as if it were a normal occurrence for a woman to bang on his bedroom door at 7 A.M. I shifted beside him, aware of his palm on my arm.

"OK," he said after I told him Annie was too sick to take me onstage that morning and that I needed him with me — well, all day. "We'll have a bite to eat, then do your show."

Still I didn't move.

"Or maybe you've had breakfast?" I stayed stock-still, and he paused.

"How could I get breakfast without Annie, or you?" I finally said. "The waiters don't know finger-spelling, and I can hardly read them my order, you know." I smiled, but I could feel in his fingers the realization that I really couldn't go out and do the simplest things on my own.

"Another blunder." He gave me his arm. "I lead you, right?"

Over breakfast we practiced my talk, until the bell clanged its thong into the air at 10. That morning, he and I bounded up the three wooden steps to the makeshift stage, the rustling of the crowd a welcome wave of warmth. After faltering a bit — I felt his weight press heavily into the floorboards — his voice rang out into the air. He told the crowd how at age 7 I had been a child with no language who fought Annie at every turn, but after weeks of spelling words into my hand Annie finally took me to the water pump in our yard. In the heat of the day Annie splashed that water over my hand, her fingers flying in mine: W-a-t-e-r. W-a-t-e-r. I leaped up, awakened. Everything had a name. Life penetrated my muffled world.

The truth is that I don't remember the moment at the water pump.

What I do remember is this: Annie took me to be examined by Alexander Graham Bell, then a prominent doctor for the deaf in Washington, DC. I was 8 years old. Dr. Bell said no, I would never hear. But he had an exciting new invention. It allowed anyone who didn't know manual finger-spelling to "talk" with the deaf.

"This could work for Helen," Dr. Bell said to Annie. She spelled his words to me, and then he slid a large, bulky "glove" over my small hand. Printed on it were letters of the "normal" alphabet. Raised, they could be felt by the wearer. I felt them on my palm. Dr. Bell tapped first the "h," then the "e." Then he pressed down harder, on the "l"two times. Last came the "o."

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"Hello," I answered back. A feeling of intense pleasure flooded through me. With my free hand, I took his. I had "spoken" to someone without Annie interpreting. "Helen will have freedom," he said to Annie, who spelled his words to me.

I couldn't wait.

All the way back to Tuscumbia I spelled to Annie that soon I would be able to speak with Father, who never was good at finger-spelling, or anyone else. "No," Annie spelled back. "It's not a good idea." I wouldn't need to communicate with others, she said, because she would tell me everything I needed to know. She wanted to keep us close because of her own loneliness.

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People say together we were miraculous. We were. But we were also isolated. I had proved I was equal — more than equal — in my intellect. But no one, from the time I was a young woman, would accept my having a lover. I couldn't accept that fate. That wasn't enough for me. I wanted more than a story frayed from its telling.

And so the final day of our tour came. As the crowd's applause receded, the stage became still. Peter introduced me: "For 25 years Helen Keller has called for the rights of the deaf and blind around the world. But she has more to say than that," Peter said, spelling his words into my hand, then giving me a nudge so hard I almost bolted forward. As he called out my words while I spelled them into his palm, I said everything Annie had warned me against.

At the end, the manager came up onstage to give us our wages: "Twenty people asked for their money back." I wasn't the Helen Keller they'd expected or wanted. But I didn't care.

After the show, I wolfed down two hamburgers with Peter at a burger shack by the hotel — Annie would never let me eat burgers in public: too vulgar, she said. But I couldn't help it. With Peter I wanted to eat hot dogs, wear high heels, drink gin.

"Here's the problem as I see it," he said. He'd just paid the lunch bill and was scribbling down the costs for the hotel plus food and gas for our car trip back to Boston the next day. "You don't mind how much you take in, and I don't know enough about your situation to give you advice."

"We'll work it out," I said, my face suddenly cool, as we walked under the hotel's covered porch.

That afternoon I napped on my hotel bed. I slept a deep, dreamless sleep. Night would come, and with it, Peter. I had no fear.

After my nap, the air was heavy with rain. The slanting, metallic vibrations outside my window meant workers were dismantling the tent. Surely Peter would realize that he should come downstairs, read to me, take me to dinner. I felt my way from window to closet, then took an armful of clothes and tossed them into the open suitcase at the foot of my bed. Still no Peter.

I decided to make a racket to guide him downstairs. I sat on my suitcase so I could fasten it tight, then pulled it over to the door; I dragged my desk chair, with great banging, away from my desk and sat down heavily. At the oak desk, I swept up my hair to show off my bare neck, the way women in romance novels always did, and unbuttoned the top two buttons of my blue dress and sat at my desk just in time. Within minutes Peter came into my room and took my hand.

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"Sorry, Boss, I slept through my afternoon shift. Wait a minute." He leaned over me and saw the Braille letter I had been reading at my desk. "Come to think of it, I'm not sorry at all. Look at you!" He took the letter and read to me that a farmer in Indiana, a German American, had refused to pay his war bonds, and a mob had attacked his house. "Hang him!" they'd cried. "Traitor!" Until his wife had convinced them to let him live.

"You work so much it makes mere humans look bad," Peter said. I put my hand on his cheek and felt his voice dip.

"That farmer needs help." I was suddenly defensive. I'd thought I could bring Peter closer by showing him my intensity. But as I spelled to him he opened and closed his palm, as if he was drawn to me but also pushed away.

"What's going on out there?" I jerked my head toward the window to get his attention away from me. The floor beneath my feet vibrated with the arrival of cars and trucks; even the arms of my chair rattled. "What are all those people coming for?"

"I thought you were the scent expert. What, can't you smell the popcorn? The fireworks, at least?" He was right. There was a singed, burnt scent in the night air. "Let's go."

He pulled my chair back from the desk. "There's a carnival. I get the inside seat on the Tilt-A-Whirl. Otherwise I get dizzy as hell. You in?"

"No." I held tight to the edge of my desk.

"Why not?"

"Do I have to explain?"

"Explain what?"

"Look out the window," I said. "I'll bet you dinner at least two photographers are out there, with press tags from the Wisconsin Tribune dangling from their shirt pockets. One man is right outside the hotel, his camera trained on the door." I felt Peter jolt a bit with surprise. "The minute I walk outside he'll demand a picture."

I tapped his chest with one finger. "Lesson one on the life of Helen Keller. I guarantee if I go to the fair there will be front-page photos of me in the papers tomorrow." I felt Peter stand perfectly still, listening to me. "So I have to get ready. Annie insists I always look normal — better than normal if I can pull it off."

"I like you the way you are." He touched my face.

"Yes, but you're not the public that pays to hear me speak. I'd go to the fair with you if I could — I'd take the outside seat on the Tilt-A-Whirl and go in the dunking booth, too."

"Seriously, Helen. Do you always live for everyone but yourself? Your public always sees you poised, perfectly smiling, the happy deaf-blind girl. Don't you ever get tired of the charade?"

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"That's enough." I suddenly felt self-conscious and missed Annie. She would understand.

Peter acted as if he didn't hear me. "Come on." He pulled my chair out and gave my shoulders a shake. "Let's get outside. Be part of the crowd." The rumble of the Ferris wheel shook the room, making the air press against me. I still refused to move, and he said, "I get it. Maybe you go only where you're invited to speak? Be up in the front, where everyone can see you?"

"That's a bit harsh." I stood up. He was my employee, after all.

He took my hand."Come back here." It was my turn to pull away and go back to work. No matter how much I argued against being idolized, I was ashamed to hear from him how much my public image meant to me.

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Peter leaned over the hotel room desk. The moment of my annoyance with him passed. I suspect it was my bare neck that called to him.

"I've written to my publisher," I said, "telling them to give the royalties to blinded German soldiers and sailors. We've done it! — you and I. Annie would have my head if she knew, but not you."

The pounding of the carnival rides shook the windows of my room as Peter recounted the way I'd spoken out to audiences in Kansas, Nebraska, and Wisconsin over the summer. How people waited to hear about the "miracle" of this deaf-blind woman who spoke her mind. I felt as if a light fell over me.

His voice flowed through my fingertips. "Don't you ever want other things?" he said. I leaned into him. "Do you want to hear this?"

"Yes."

"Helen, kiss me."

I felt his warm breath on my mouth. "Wait. Not yet."

I fumbled with the little glass figurines on my desktop, suddenly unsure. "Will you — " I moved suddenly toward the door and opened it for him to leave. "Give me some time?" I said, and I stumbled over my opened suitcase.

When I slipped, Peter steadied me. "I'm getting pretty good at this."

"Catching me?" I picked up the hem of my floor-length calico dress and swept it free of dust.

"Keeping you on your own two feet is more like it." He followed me back into my room. "Kiss me."

He pulled me back to him. His mouth salt, willow trees, pear. I held his face with my hands, his button-down shirt scratchy as he pulled me close. His hands warmed my back.

"Annie is sick. I have to check on her upstairs."

"Right. Another person who needs you."

I leaned forward. "We'll be home soon. When we get there, walk down the hill behind my house to King's Pond. Meet me there for a swim. I promise you'll like what you see."

Why was I so brazen — so forward with Peter? I was 36 years old and had never before been alone with a man, never mind one with a mouth like night. Peter paused, his palm tentative.

"Listen, I can barely do the crawl. But if you want me in the water with you, I'm there."

I was so relieved that I joked, "If you start drowning, I'll let you sink like a stone."

"You're not my lifeguard?" He felt the smile on my face and pulled me closer.

Here's another thing I kept out of all those books: I would do it again.

Afterword

Helen Keller never publicly spoke of her love affair with Peter Fagan, and never married. She lived in Forest Hills, NY, with her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy (and then in Connecticut), and channeled her energies into improving conditions for the blind and deaf-blind around the world. The actual letters from her affair were burned — leaving much to the imagination.

Author Buzz

Startled to learn a childhood idol was "not the person we all thought we knew," author Rosie Sultan is nonetheless thrilled to have brought alive Helen Keller's secret love. Winner of a PEN Discovery Award, Sultan lives with her husband and son in Brookline, MA.